Permits for Extinction

The Trump administration, and the system that enabled it, want to turn legal definitions into death sentences for the wild.

This proposed rule change is an extinction strategy masquerading as legal precision.

In its latest push to weaken environmental protections, the Trump administration has proposed rewriting the definition of “harm” under the Endangered Species Act. If finalized, this change would effectively gut one of the most vital mechanisms we have for protecting endangered species, the ability to defend the places they need to live.

Under the Act, it's long been understood that you don’t need to shoot a wolf to harm it, destroying its den or cutting down its feeding grounds does the job just as well. That understanding has kept over 1,700 species from disappearing since 1973. But now, Trump’s regulators want to change all that. They’re arguing, in essence, that unless you personally strangle a prairie chicken, you're free to pave over its last viable mating ground.

The inspiration for this shift? A decades-old dissenting opinion from the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who believed “harm” should only mean direct and intentional injury to an individual animal. Not habitat loss. Not environmental degradation. Not extinction by slow starvation.

It’s legal nihilism dressed in the robes of originalism, and it reveals just how badly the regulatory system is rigged.

Agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission don’t work the way most people think they do. FERC isn’t a neutral referee, it doesn’t exist to deny permits, it’s mission is to grant permits, but with conditions. It's a revolving door operation where fossil fuel executives trade chairs with regulators, and pipeline approvals are all but guaranteed. Its budget is funded almost entirely through fees collected from the energy companies it oversees, making it less a watchdog and more a concierge. This is by design, it’s institutional capture. And the decisions it makes don’t just shape our grid, they bulldoze ecosystems, displace communities, and greenlight destruction under the illusion of procedural legitimacy.

Worse, many of the rules they enforce were written with heavy input, or outright authorship, from corporate lawyers, industry coalitions, and lobbyists. The fox not only guards the henhouse, it helped design the blueprint, budget the wiring, and draft the fire code.

And once a company gets a permit to pollute, whether it’s to discharge waste into a river, clear-cut a forest, or inject toxic chemicals into the soil, that same permit becomes a legal shield. It doesn’t matter that people get sick. It doesn’t matter that species vanish. As long as the paperwork is in order, the harm is considered lawful.

It’s systemic indemnification.

And here's the part we have to confront honestly, even if Trump were out of office tomorrow, it’s unlikely the damage already done to our institutions by DOGE would simply snap back to sanity. If all the consumer protection agencies and evironmental protection agencies can be dismantled so easily, so surgically, by the flick of a pen, and the whim of a self-serving billionaire, then maybe it wasn’t stable to begin with.

Maybe the goal shouldn’t be restoration, but reinvention.

One form of reinvention begins with a different question, not what corporations are allowed to take, and how much they are allowed to pollute, but what the Earth has the right to keep.

Rights of nature, if built into our constitution, flips the legal paradigm. It recognizes that rivers, forests, wetlands, and species are not property, but living entities with the right to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve. It says that harm cannot be legalized through paperwork. That life itself is a right, not just for us, but for the ecosystems we’re part of and depend upon.

And if that idea sounds radical, consider what’s already become normalized: issuing permits for extinction. Calling it progress. Pretending it’s anything but what it is, genocide by red tape.

The public comment period for the proposed rule change redefining "harm" under the Endangered Species Act is open until Monday, May 19, 2025.

To submit your comment, visit the Federal Register notice here: Federal Register